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The PAC to End All PACs

Imagine for a moment that you hail from one of the most famous families in international finance. Your father is worth $20 billion. And on account of his largesse, your last name is as synonymous with Democratic politics as Roosevelt or Kennedy.

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Seeking your generosity, candidates come to you, hat in hand. Your concerns, they tell you, will be their concerns—so long as you contribute at their next fundraiser. And then, in your early 40s, you decide that this whole system is messed up. That it is you, and people like you, the rarest of the one percenters, who have warped our politics.

This, in essence, is the path recently trod by Jonathan Soros, the son of the financier George Soros, who, like his father, has given prodigiously to Democratic interests—more than $2 million in the last few years to various candidates and causes. But now he’s hoping his cash can buy him something more: He’s quietly bankrolling an effort to limit the very influence of rich donors like him.

Sitting on the 40th floor of the midtown Manhattan office tower that houses the private investment firm he runs, with Central Park at his feet and a cloud-covered city rolling behind him, Soros is aware of the irony—as well as the skepticism—that surrounds such an idea. But he has sketched out an ambitious plan to support candidates in congressional and state-level elections across the country who can help push the most sweeping campaign finance reforms in a generation, reforms that would include a national clean elections bill, which would mandate a robust public financing system for all federal elections. If all goes according to his ambitious plan, Soros sees this happening by 2021. “The path will not be straight, we know that,” he says. “But there is real momentum. We are serious about winning.”

Soros, 43, doesn’t fit the stereotype of the dowdy good-government scold. Wearing gray jeans and an open collared shirt, he smiles easily, flashing what seems like disregard for the long odds his effort faces. Soros began his mission to solve the problem of money in politics in 2012 when he founded Friends of Democracy PAC, a hybrid political action committee and super PAC with a staff of three. The group, which has an office in Washington, D.C, jumped into eight competitive congressional elections that year and spent more than $1.7 million backing candidates who pledged to support a series of campaign-finance principles, including proposals to strengthen election law enforcement and institute publicly financed elections. Seven of their candidates won office.

This year, the organization wants to ensure those seven stay in office, while getting behind another eight candidates yet to be determined. The group is also taking aim at lawmakers in state legislatures around the country who have been attempting to loosen regulations on campaign financing. This effort has involved a rather un-Soros-like strategy: Friends of Democracy has found a couple of Republican candidates in close contests willing to buck their party establishment and support clean elections. “The new McCains,” Soros calls them, and the hope is that they are willing to take a dollop of Soros cash in exchange for pledging to limit the role of the rest of the big money funders. The outfit is still scouting possible beneficiaries of its handouts, but Soros mentioned Rep. Walter Jones, the maverick North Carolina Republican, as a possibility—and he said the group is eyeing other candidates who hail from deep blue states. “We might be able to get away with it in Massachusetts,” he says.

But first, he has to take Albany.

The Empire State has been designated the initial domino in the Soros mission not because the place is uniquely corrupted by cash, but rather because that’s where campaign reform efforts have gained the most traction already. Talk of reform in New York caught Soros’s attention in 2011, just as he was preparing to leave his father’s hedge fund and strike out on his own. A self-described “democracy geek,” the younger Soros earned a degree at Harvard Law School, where he studied under the civil rights activist Lani Guinier, and then served as an election observer when democracy came to the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. In New York, he glimpsed an opportunity, he says, to encourage a fairer process. In 2012, Soros poured $250,000 into the campaign of Cecilia Tkaczyk, an upstate state Senate candidate who made campaign finance reform a key part of her come-from-behind victory, and helped lobby Gov. Andrew Cuomo to keep a campaign promise to push for campaign finance reform.

Now, Cuomo has included a fair elections proposal in his state budget—a measure that, among other things, would create a public financing system and lower contribution limits for donors—to nudge New York away from its pay-to-play political culture. But supporters of the measure are not hopeful. “There are members who say they support us, but they don’t really,” said one Albany political operative who requested anonymity. “They perceive it as not in their self-interest.”

Soros is holding out hope that Cuomo will make good on the promise to enact reform. “If you look at the things he campaigned on, this is the last one he hasn’t gotten done,” Soros says. “For a guy who likes to check the box, this is a big deal as he heads into his re-election campaign.” And for Soros—a guy trying to check some boxes of his own—New York’s reform measure could provide an invaluable example of what might be possible nationwide.

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David Freedlander is senior political correspondent with The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter @Freedlander.